Jaou Tunis Biennale Returns With 16 New Commissions From 23 October

The 8th Jaou Tunis Biennale opens in the Tunisian capital on 23 October and runs until 22 November. Its centrepiece exhibition, Becoming the Ocean, presents 16 newly-commissioned works by artists from Africa, the Arab world, Latin America and Asia. After Tunis, the show tours to Venice, Brussels, Geneva and London, where it will be presented at Ibraaz.

Founded in 2013 by the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, the bi-yearly event has built a reputation as a focal point for lens-based and visual art from the Global South and its diaspora. This year's edition, co-curated by Lina Lazaar and Andrea Bellini, marks two institutional firsts. Geneva's Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement (BIM'26) leaves Switzerland for the first time in its history to debut on the African continent, and the Art Explora Foundation's nomadic Mediterranean festival concludes its journey across the sea with its final anchoring in Tunis.

Organisers describe the festival as a "biennale-archipel" – an interconnected network of ideas, images and geographies spread across the historic city.

Where does the main exhibition take place?

Becoming the Ocean is housed inside the Quechlet El Attarine, a 19th-century Ottoman military barracks within the UNESCO-listed Medina of Tunis. The exhibition draws on Khalil Gibran's metaphor of a river that mistakes transformation for disappearance. It reflects on a world in which inherited structures can no longer respond to the crises they have produced, asking which new forms of memory and solidarity emerge when survival is understood as dependent on interconnectedness rather than independence.

The curators foreground female and MENA-region perspectives. Confirmed participants include:

• Tabarak Allah Abbas
• Hajra Waheed
• Sarah Zeryab
• Younès Ben Slimane
• Emerging artists Alaa Mansour, Liv Schulman and Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro

Through the moving image, these artists confront systemic transitions, memory preservation and alternative responses to societal crises.

Why does the biennale spread across the city?

The festival's colloquial Tunisian name, "Jaou", loosely translates as "atmosphere" or "good vibes". True to that spirit, the programme refuses the traditional white cube. Beyond the barracks, photography installations, audio-visual environments and live performances will occupy the Église Sainte-Croix, Cinema Rio, the Ancienne Bourse du Travail and the B7L9 Art Centre.

A public programme runs alongside the exhibition. It includes photography workshops for emerging talent, site-specific performances and an international symposium on the future of Mediterranean cultural cross-pollination. Exhibiting artists will join panels on their role within, and responsibility towards, their chosen medium and the world at large. Guest speakers include Mohammed el-Kurd and Shimon Basar.

What happens after Tunis?

The tour to Venice, Brussels, Geneva and London (at Ibraaz) gives the 16 newly-commissioned projects an international reach well beyond the month-long run in Tunis. For audiences seeking visual art from the Global South and its diaspora, Jaou Tunis 2026 offers a communal, city-wide platform grounded in the Medina itself, with further coverage to follow as the biennale unfolds.

Jaou Tunis Biennale runs 23 October – 22 November; jaou.tn